Gail Hareven0.0 Acclaimed author Noa Weber has a successful ""feminist"" life: a strong career, a daughter she raised alone and she is a respected cultural figure. Yet her interior life is bound by her obsessive love for one man, the father of her child, who has drifted in and out of her life. Trying to understand this lifelong obsession, Noa turns the pen on herself and dissects her life with relentless honesty. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modern-day Israel, this becomes a quest to transform irrational desire into a transcendent understanding of love.
Ignacio De Loyo Brandao0.0 With an army of consultants, a library of ""how-to"" manuals and an endless variety of product placements at his behest, the hero of Anonymous Celebrity sets out to become king of his own little world - which unfortunately turns out to be the same one the rest of us live in. Equal parts Nabokov, All About Eve and Big Brother, this is a bawdy, irreverent indictment of our self-absorbed culture of celebrity, where to be anything less than famous means being something less than human...
Jan Kjaerstad0.0 The third volume of Jan Kjaerstad's award-winning trilogy finds Jonas aboard the Voyager, a small boat exploring the reaches of the great Sognefjord in Western Norway. Also on board, four young people engaged in a multi-media project to chart all aspects of the fjord - its geography, people, and history. But, like the space probe the boat is named for, Jonas' personal journey of discovery reaches far beyond the usual confines of time or space. With all the breathtaking prowess of a master juggler, Jan Kjaerstad throws episode after episode from Jonas Wergeland's life into the air and holds them, suspended, like planets in solar system. And the reader, once again, is drawn into Wergeland's universe, and taken on a journey - this time with his daughter as guide - to discover finally the truth about his life, and what led to the death of his wife.
Cesar Aira0.0 “On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.”—from Ghosts
Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.
Сигизмунд Кржижановский0.0 A man lives in a tiny apartment, engulfed in the noise of his neighbors’ lives, squeezed in among his few possessions, hardly able to move. A mysterious figure turns up at his door, offering a tube of a substance that will, he assures our hero, allow him to enlarge–“biggerize”–his living space. “Why not?”–but clumsily he spills the stuff on the floor. When he wakes the next morning his apartment has begun to grow exponentially, and with it his troubles. What if people find out? He’ll lose his apartment. He must keep everyone at bay, stay to himself. Meanwhile his furniture drifts into the distance. He is lost in the infinitely expanding space of his own loneliness.
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s--but deemed too subversive even to show to a publisher--the seven tales presented here attest to Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absent-minded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future... Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. "I am interested," he said, "not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life."
Jose Manuel Prieto0.0 Now in paperback, José Manuel Prieto’s Rex is a sexy, zany, and sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.
J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy’s father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily’s wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars.
Rex is an unforgettable achievement: an illusory, allusive gem of a novel that confirms José Manuel Prieto as one of the most talented writers of his generation.
Robert Walser3.7 "The Tanners is a contender for Funniest Book of the Year."―The Village Voice
The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Three brothers and a sister comprise the Tanner family―Simon, Kaspar, Klaus, and Hedwig: their wanderings, meetings, separations, quarrels, romances, employment and lack of employment over the course of a year or two are the threads from which Walser weaves his airy, strange and brightly gorgeous fabric. “Walser’s lightness is lighter than light,” as Tom Whalen said in Bookforum: “buoyant up to and beyond belief, terrifyingly light.”
Robert Walser―admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin―is a radiantly original author. He has been acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” (J.M. Coetzee), “a bewitched genius” (Newsweek), and “a major, truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer” (Susan Sontag). Considering Walser’s “perfect and serene oddity,” Michael Hofmann in The London Review of Books remarked on the “Buster Keaton-like indomitably sad cheerfulness [that is] most hilariously disturbing.” The Los Angeles Times called him “the dreamy confectionary snowflake of German language fiction. He also might be the single most underrated writer of the 20th century....The gait of his language is quieter than a kitten’s.”
“A clairvoyant of the small” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.
Wolf Haas0.0 This is no conventional narrative. The reader must infer a sensational love story that the author hasn't actually written but which his fictional persona describes to a contentious interviewer. This narrative grips the reader as they argue about the mysterious plot.
Hugo Claus0.0 While exposing the remains of Flemish fascism twenty years after the War, Wonder tracks one man¢s descent into madness. Victor, a bewildered teacher, pursues a mysterious woman to a castle in a remote village. There he finds himself trapped among a handful of desperate individuals still living out their collaboration with the Nazis. As Victor¢s sanity begins to crumble, he poses as an expert on their messianic leader, who disappeared at the Russian front but whose return they believe imminent. The rich cadences of the prose and dense emotional texture of characters lost in complex moral labyrinths make Wonder a symphony only Claus could have composed.
Елена Фанайлова2.0 "Русская версия" Елены Фанайловой похожа на увлекательную адаптацию американского блокбастера о России, о русском языке и русских людях. Пронзительные стихи, жестокие рецензии, откровенные интервью. Диск "Русская версия" - авторское исполнение
